Blue Mountain Resort - EMS Environmental, Inc.

Saving on Snowmaking:
A Case Study
©Blue Mountain Resort
Saving Some Green at Blue Mountain
Blue Mountain Resort
https://www.skibluemt.com/winter-sports/skiingsnowboarding/
Executive Summary
Palmerton, PA
When Barbara Green became CEO of Blue Mountain Resort,
Palmerton, PA, she inherited a ski area known for its
physical advantages. She knew its assets—having grown
up as a witness to her father’s dreams and from working in
its operations—but also knew it was lacking in amenities.
With the opportunity to turn it around, she came with the
vision of making Blue Mountain a destination resort.
“Once I decided to challenge the old ways things were
done at Blue Mountain, I knew I was going to need
reinforcement from professional who had many years of
experience in order to convince the rest of our
organization that change is a good thing—especially
when it saves us money! That’s when I turned to the
experts at EMS.” – Barbara Green, CEO
Challenges
Green began to create a new vision for the future of the
resort and quickly realized she needed to change the
culture of the organization in order to grow it. She
EMS Environmental, Inc.
Saving on Snowmaking
questioned the belief that things should be done a
certain way because “this is the way we have
always done it,” and began making operational
and investment decisions based upon accounting,
engineering, and strategic planning.
When she took over, the ski area was successful at
satisfying skiers but the income statement and
balance sheet did not reflect its success. Through
Green’s experience as a controller and CFO, she
knew how to break down the business into the
areas that needed attention. She knew she needed
to measure every department, every function and
every cost center and revenue source. This review
immediately led to a new accounting system and
electronic lift pass checking.
How Automation Helped
For most resorts in the ski business, energy is
the second largest expense after payroll.
Energy is perceived as the cost of doing
business rather than a cost that can be
strategically controlled as part of a business
plan. Coming from industries involved in energy
management, Green believed this significant
expense could be and needed to be strategically
controlled. So, she turned to the energy engineers
at EMS Environmental, Inc. in Bethlehem, PA.
EMS Environmental’s approach was not simply
collecting load data and reporting energy use, but
also understanding how, where, and when
energy use impacts not just a business in
general, but specifically Blue Mountain’s
business. EMS also has the engineering depth to
evaluate Blue Mountain’s operations and how
they can be made more energy efficient while
maintaining—and usually improving— the
performance and/or quality of the operations
vital to the business. Green was able to gain an
on-going partner to help her transform a large
expense into an investment vehicle.
EMS Environmental, Inc.
EMS began with an energy assessment that quantified all of
the resort’s energy use and came up with a game plan for
saving energy throughout the property. EMS put together
an overall strategy for short-term and long-term savings
across all facets of the business. This strategy involved
building envelope efficiency, lighting and controls, HVAC,
lifts, slope lights, and snowmaking. EMS also presented
energy efficiency incentives from the local electric utility
and other funding opportunities that could be generated by
making energy efficiency investments.
Central to the strategy was snowmaking. Like most ski
areas in Pennsylvania, Blue Mountain expends over 75% of
its energy cost on snowmaking. However, snowmaking is
an area where lots of energy can be saved. Further,
snowmaking is of such strategic importance to the ski
area, that improving its efficiency can also
dramatically improve the ski area’s ability to open
more quickly and deliver quality guest experiences.
Snowmaking was a classic case of where “the way we have
always done it” was costing Blue Mountain money and
opportunity. Both Green and EMS recognized that
snowmaking energy could not be saved without
snowmaker involvement.
As one part of the strategy, EMS introduced the concept of
“expensive snow” to help snowmakers make more efficient
snowmaking decisions. As part of this tactic, EMS
developed a cost-comparison of which types of the many
snow guns at Blue Mountain were the most energy efficient
per unit of snow made.
Snowmaking measurement sled with automated data collection for
ease in measuring snow gun production versus energy use while
monitoring conditions at which the snow is being made.
Saving on Snowmaking
The perceived most-effective snow gun appeared
to generate a lot of snow and was the go-to gun
when conditions were tough and opening
imminent. EMS worked with the snowmakers to
measure the snow gun’s output, which turned
out to be actually less than more energyefficient snow guns, and later demonstrated
faster opening using other, more efficient snow
guns.
EMS helped further demonstrate that snow could
now be made on more trails simultaneously,
opening with more trails and moving to full-fare
conditions faster.
In an ideal world, the optimum type of snow gun
would be placed along all the ski trails in the
resort. In practice, the investment over a single
season would be financially imprudent. More
important, wet bulb, wind, water pressure, pipe
sizes and operating conditions vary across the
mountain, making one size fits all an unlikely
proposition. EMS worked with Blue Mountain
relative to the existing snow guns and the
opportunities to leverage the most benefit for each
of the conditions from the least investment.
EMS focused on the opportunities with automation.
Particularly in Pennsylvania, there are limited windows
when the weather is suitable for making snow. Portions of
the weather window can’t be wasted setting up snow guns
and then adjusting them to the weather conditions.
Blue Mountain had long since established the need for fixed
snow guns and hydrants at industry-leading closely-spaced
intervals that did not need to be re-positioned for each
snowmaking effort; they could be simply connected and
adjusted. With snow gun automation, even these two steps
could be eliminated. More importantly, with automation,
the snow guns could adjust themselves to weather changes
instead of requiring additional labor to service each snow
gun while incurring losses in quality and production
pending the manual adjustment.
Tight snow gun spacing maximizes production and distribution; located on
both sides as appropriate for trail width and wind conditions.
©Blue Mountain Resort
Automation of the snow guns alone would not maximize
production response to weather windows. The pumps
would need to be automated to eliminate the trimming and
adjusting required with hundreds of snow guns activating
across the mountain at any one time. The first step was
Variable Frequency Drives (VFD) for at least one motor
in every pump set in order to supply a constant pressure
supply that could automatically adjust to changes in snow
gun demand.
Low Energy snow guns expand capacity and are amazing producers in
the right application.
EMS Environmental, Inc.
Saving on Snowmaking
Results, Return on Investment, and Future
Plans
©Blue Mountain Resort
Automation provides tremendous advantages and, in the right
application, is more cost-effective than manual snow guns.
The next step was to make the pumps act like
snow guns—automatically configuring and
adjusting to demand from the snow gun customers
(using a system supplied by TechnoAlpin)—which
resulted in the ability to start the snowmaking
process within seven minutes of compatible
weather conditions while operating more
efficiently, resulting in lower hours on the pumps.
Automated constant pressure pumping system is the key to fast
startup, productivity and energy efficiency. It shouldn’t be a high-wire
act.
One of the additional benefits of the automation is
the ability to run the snow guns for short periods
of time to dust slopes with fresh snow without
having to devote a shift to snowmaking which, due
to the onerous manual pre-setup and postproduction hose-draining steps, is typically the
case. The dusting results in better conditions and
greater safety for the guests while reducing overproduction of snow that virtually-instant startup
and shutdown affords.
EMS Environmental, Inc.
The conversion to more efficient snow guns and
automation was expensive. The conversion has been an
ongoing process as the resort has to prioritize investments
each season. EMS has helped Blue Mountain make the most
cost-effective choices to gain the biggest production
advantages for each investment, all aimed at maximizing
the weather window.
EMS helped Blue Mountain leverage the expense of snow
gun upgrades and automation by obtaining custom utility
rebates for each snowmaking efficiency improvement.
To date, EMS has obtained over $550,000 in energy
efficiency rebates for Blue Mountain. While the energy
efficiency rebates greatly helped off-set the cost of the
improvements, the greatest savings is the more
efficient equipment translates into over 5.5 million
fewer kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per year,
which translates into an annual savings of $500,000
and avoids 4.9 million pounds of CO2 greenhouse gases.
Also important, with EMS’s approach to snowmaking
energy as a strategy, Blue Mountain has added top-line
revenue with faster opening and recovery throughout the
season.
Snowmaking has been just one facet of Blue Mountain’s
energy strategy. With EMS as a partner, Blue Mountain
has made energy efficiency a part of their successful
strategy for the resort’s future.
“It is important to the entire organization at Blue Mountain to provide a
high-quality guest experience year after year. The sustainable snowmaking
methods and resort operations implemented by the professionals at EMS
Environmental give us confidence in our ability to continue saving money
while reducing our environmental footprint—so we can ensure our visitors
will always have the best experience on our mountain!” – Barbara Green,
CEO
Saving on Snowmaking